In the case that traveling faster than light or using 'shortcuts' via wormholes isn't possible, the conclusion must be that whoever is out there and whatever kind of technology they may possess, they'll be 'grounded' in their own galaxy unless they are up for spending millions of years traveling to even their nearest neighbor.

Example:The Milky Way's nearest big neighbor, M31 - The Andromeda Galaxy, is 2.6 million Light Years away from us. Meaning that even if one could travel at the Speed of Light, one would have to be on the move for 2.6 million years - and that's just the nearest big neighbor. (There are some smaller galaxies closer than Andromeda but Andromeda is a good reference point and people know about it. In either case it's practically 'next door' in relative terms.)

Being able to do this however means having reached an extremely advanced level of technology - we're talking 300,000 KM/Sec or 1,080,000,000 KM/Hour. So let's ask ourselves how likely it is that there's even ONE of those civilizations for every galaxy out there. Well, who knows. There might be 100 per galaxy or there might be 1 per 100 galaxies. Or none at all. What's likely or not isn't the topic however - the goal is to paint a picture of how it really is if FTL (Faster Than Light) is impossible and 'shortcuts' through time and space just isn't happening for any civilization, no matter how technologically advanced they are.

One could talk about cryonic hibernation (the freezing of a body to suspend it) for long travels but we're still talking such vast distances that even if a civilization out there did endeavour on such a massive project (to travel millions of Light Years - just to reach their nearest neighbor), they'd still be unable to go very far in relative terms. As in they wouldn't be able to cover say even 0.1% of the total distance between peripherals (if there even are any peripherals - the 'edge' isn't really where we see it but much further out!) in the vast expanse known as the Universe.

So.. somewhere out there there might be this hyper-advanced civilization who have overcome all the hurdles (surviving all the things that could go wrong over a long period of time basically) of reaching such a point that they are at the very technological limitation (or the intergalactic speed limit, which would be the Speed of Light, if you will. And remember, no 'shortucts' either)..

.. yet in reality they have to be content with only having the opportunity to explore their own galaxy. Let's say they live in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way. 250,000,000,000 stars (some say this number might be 4x higher but that's another story). The Milky Way is roughly 100,000 Light Years in diameter. Traveling from one end of their galaxy to the other would thus require them to be on the move for 100,000 years. Or in case they were only really interested in their local star cluster within their galaxy, they'd still have to travel up to 5,000 years to cover enough ground to even be able to plot out a small circle on their map of their galaxy and say they've explored this part. All this at a speed of over 1 billion KM/hour, the Speed of Light, mind you.

Estimates are that there are at least 100 billion galaxies in the universe, but this number is probably much higher. Most scientists would probably give you the number 200 billion if asked but if you inquired more thoroughly with those sames scientists, they'd easily give you numbers such as 500 billion or even 1,000 billion, it's just hard to say.

The reason for this is that wherever you are in the universe, you are in the center of the universe. Picture a circle around your location and that is the entire universe. The edges of the circle is 13.7 billion Light Years away. Now let's say someone 5 billlion Light Years away from you does the exact same thing. He too would be at the center of the universe and the edges of his circle would also be 13.7 billion Light Years away and those two circles would overlap each other. This is because the edge is as far away as the light has traveled since the supposed beginning of time and we can not see any further. But meanwhile, the universe have expanded and the edges are actually much further out - and there are galaxies there too that we can't see.

If you ever laid down on a football field and looked around, you'd see a lot of grass. Some person figured out that there are about half a billion straws of grass on an average football field - multiply by 1,000 and you have 500 billion. One straw of grass for every galaxy out there. Ish.

We are all puny and insignificant and no matter how far we advance as a society we will never conquer the universe because our entire galaxy is a blade of grass at the center of a football field what does that make us as individuals?

never saw the logical reasoning why thinks shouldnt be able to go faster then the speed of light. You give them enough energy to move faster then the speed of light and have the engine for it or whatever i dont see why the speed of light would be a barrier to how fast you could travel....

never saw the logical reasoning why thinks shouldnt be able to go faster then the speed of light. You give them enough energy to move faster then the speed of light and have the engine for it or whatever i dont see why the speed of light would be a barrier to how fast you could travel....

just saying i mean basing everything on some theory of relativity seems a bit dumb. What if he was wrong and everything we are basing on his work is wrong? Or has exceptions. There is no way we can know that he is right yet, and there probably wont be for a very long time.

i love how you have no fking clue wtf your talking about and just try to seem smart. Ofcourse you can google it and come out pretending to know something but the fact is i probably know about 10X as much about the relativity theory, photons, the universe and science in general then you do. Particles are assumed to have travelled faster then the speed of ligth during the big bang so i dont see why it cant be possible for us to do.

never saw the logical reasoning why thinks shouldnt be able to go faster then the speed of light. You give them enough energy to move faster then the speed of light and have the engine for it or whatever i dont see why the speed of light would be a barrier to how fast you could travel....

ROFL. "never saw logical reasoning"...

Fuck Kakio....every god damn time.

If you cared you could've gotten your answer in about 5mins with a web search, if you didn't why even post this shit. The only logical answer is that you are braindead.

i love how you have no fking clue wtf your talking about and just try to seem smart. Ofcourse you can google it and come out pretending to know something but the fact is i probably know about 10X as much about the relativity theory, photons, the universe and science in general then you do. Particles are assumed to have travelled faster then the speed of ligth during the big bang so i dont see why it cant be possible for us to do.

Probably not.

iirc those particles were always traveling faster than light, i.e. they weren't accelerated from rest.

we already calculated and simulated relativity, we've even seen it in astronauts already. its hardly even a theory anymore its pretty much fact.

Lets assume that they travel at a speed near 20,000 miles per hour. This is about 9 kilometers/sec or something like 0.00003 times the speed of light. This produces a special relativistic time dilation factor of 1+.5*(.00003)^2 = 1.00000000045
If we multiply this by the 6 month trip, then we get that the astronauts would be about .007 seconds younger than if thay had stayed on the Earth. There is also a slight gravitational time dilation effect ( 1 - 2GM/rc^2 )^1/2 because their trip was at a lower gravitational field than on the surface, but this is not very large compared to the special relativistic factor.

the fact is i probably know about 10X as much about the relativity theory, photons, the universe and science in general then you do.

never saw the logical reasoning why thinks shouldnt be able to go faster then the speed of light. You give them enough energy to move faster then the speed of light and have the engine for it or whatever i dont see why the speed of light would be a barrier to how fast you could travel....

nope.

just saying i mean basing everything on some theory of relativity seems a bit dumb. What if he was wrong and everything we are basing on his work is wrong? Or has exceptions. There is no way we can know that he is right yet, and there probably wont be for a very long time.